More on my fiction writing

June 02, 2018

Phoenix 101: Canals

Beneath all the concrete, asphalt, and gravel of today's metropolitan Phoenix is some of the richest soil on earth. No wonder early settlers called it the Nile River Valley of the United States, or, with more aching pathos given what's happened, American Eden. Add water and anything will grow here. Getting the water from the Salt River was the challenge — one solved with canals.

The Hohokam (750-1450 AD) built at least 500 miles of canals in the Salt River Valley. The mileage might have been in the thousands. They created the most advanced irrigation civilization in the pre-Columbian Americas.

The genius of Jack Swilling — Confederate deserter, Indian fighter, prospector, drunk, opium addict, brawler, first town postmaster and justice of the peace, adoptive father of an Apache boy, cherished friend of many — was that he understood the significance of the Hohokam canals, which laid dormant for more than 400 years. They were not mere prehistoric curiosities. They were the means of building a modern empire, where a new civilization would arise from the ashes of its predecessor. (Why would you use the amorphous word "Valley" when you have the magical and appropriate name: Phoenix).

With a gang of miners from Wickenburg, Swilling cleaned out one canal that became Swilling's Ditch, or the Salt River Canal in 1867. Later it was called the Salt River Canal and the Town Ditch, running roughly near what became Van Buren Street into the new townsite of Phoenix. Gravity carried water from the Salt to irrigate crops. More entrepreneurs followed and two decades of canal reclamation and building commenced. Upstream, the Tempe Canal opened in 1870. Mormon settlers dug canals eight miles farther upstream to give birth to Mesa. Today's Grand Canal sits atop a former Hohokam canal.

The most ambitious effort of the early era was the Arizona Canal, started in 1883. Wider and deeper than its counterparts, it took water much farther upstream and ran far north of the Phoenix townsite. While the earlier canals were built by farmers, the Arizona Canal was financed by eastern speculative capital and opened vast new areas to cultivation. The Arizona Improvement Co. sold land and water along its length, reaching all the way to the future Glendale and Peoria. One customer was former Army chaplain Winfield Scott, who introduced citrus trees and for whom Scottsdale is named. W. J. Murphy, chief contractor of the canal, also experimented with citrus. He also built a golf course. By 1890, 110,000 acres were irrigated in the Valley. But the private sector alone could not sustain the future.

The 1890s saw a severe drought in the Southwest and financial panics back east. It was the razor's edge of Phoenix's future. Many wondered if the new settlers faced the fate of the Hohokam. Federal reclamation came with the 1902 Newlands Act, championed by President Theodore Roosevelt and lobbied for by Salt River Valley leaders. What became Theodore Roosevelt Dam was the first Newlands project, ensuring the fickle bounty of the Salt River could be captured and stored. More dams followed. With the water supply secure, canal building accelerated. During World War II, Italian prisoners of war worked cleaning them out. By the 1960s, more than half a million acres were under irrigated cultivation.

In addition to the 131 miles of large canals, including the Arizona, Grand, Crosscut, Western, and Consolidated, every square mile was bordered by 1,000 miles of small ditches, so-called laterals. For decades, they were lined with cottonwoods, ashes, willows, and other shade trees. Older Phoenicians can still remember swimming, even waterskiing, on the artificial waterways. We reached my Great-Aunt Eula's shady acreage by driving over a lateral. I remember my grandmother taking me out on farmland, under a shade tree with passing water, for picnics. By the 1960s, the Salt River Project removed thousands of trees lining the canals and most of the laterals were paved over in subsequent decades as farms and acreages were subsumed in suburbia. The deep and rugged Crosscut, which added character to Arcadia, was covered.

When you went north of the Arizona Canal, you left the oasis and went into the desert (neither had today's ubiquitous gravel).

Despite Phoenix's many lurid murders, bodies tended to be dumped in the desert, not the canals. Too much risk of swimmers or farmers seeing you. Still, the only unsolved killing of an FBI agent happened in 1929 at the Arizona Canal. I fictionalized this as a plot in my David Mapstone Mystery Dry Heat. In recent years, the canals have been used for grisly work (here, for example). The big danger is still unwary swimmers being caught in spillways and other parts of the complicated waterworks.

In recent years, the city has worked with SRP to reclaim miles of canals as walking and biking trails. Alas, the trees never returned.

Gallery — Canals:

The Hohokam canal system, from a study by Omar Turney in 1929.

An 1895 map of irrigation canals in the Salt River Valley, with land platted from the Gila and Salt river meridian.

During my years at Frank Borman Junior High and Maryvale High School in the early 90s, I was a long-distance runner on the track and cross-country teams. My teammates and I spent many afternoons doing endurance training along the banks of the Grand Canal. In the springtime, we'd pluck grapefruits from the branches of trees that hung over backyard fences along the canal, for a refreshing treat.

It seems to have been a huge lost opportunity that Phoenix did not face buildings toward the canals. San Antonio, Venice and Amsterdam did. Water has a special magic in the desert, and I wonder what Phoenix would be like today if the canals had been the centerpieces rather than the back alleys of its urban design.

It is always a pleasure to read these columns. Growing up midtown in the the 70's with a canal close to the house, it was our playground. Hunting mud-puppies, dirt-clod fights and running around down there when they cleared them out. It is nice to see the area's being reclaimed, but with our current economic and homeless problems, they will be underutilized and become problem areas.